Monday, December 19, 2016

So to break a recent trend, I am
actually writing this blog post while still in the country in which the action
takes place. I have caught up on my
posting backlog to mid-November, when Terri and I arrived in Madagascar. I will try to break our time in Madagascar
into three or four smaller chunks to keep it a bit more manageable, and this
first part will deal with our time in Andasibe, a wonderful introduction to the
wilderness of the country.

Chameleon sticking his face into the light

Arriving in Madagascar in the
afternoon of Thursday November 10th was a bit disorienting; seen
from above, the highlands of Madagascar look very clearcut and denuded, with
dense rice cultivation in the valley bottoms in tightly-packed terraces. I looked in vain for any evidence of
surviving rainforest. Immigration took a
long time, and was spectacularly inefficient, and then buying local SIM cards
took a while as well, as did changing money. Eventually we piled ourselves and
our luggage into an ancient banger of a Renault and set off for town. There was none of the usual Third World
window-dressing of a fancy new expressway from the international airport
leading downtown to wow diplomats and businesspeople. The drive was agonizingly slow, along narrow
potholed roads clogged with traffic, vendors, pedestrians, cyclists, beggars
and animals. It took an hour to move
less than 10 kilometres to our hotel, the Sole, and if anything the centre of
town was even poorer-looking and more chaotic than the outskirts had been. We checked into our room and then went out
for a short orientation walk around town.
I have been to a lot of poverty-ridden big cities around the world, and
while Antananarivo (aka “Tana”) isn’t as godawful as Dhaka or Delhi, or as
soul-destroying as Manila or Jakarta, it is not a pleasant town. There is rampant poverty, widespread begging,
indescribable filth and hopeless traffic.
It was quite an assault on the senses after a month in eastern Europe
and six months in southern Africa, and we were glad to retreat to the hotel for
food and an early night.

The expressive eyes of a common brown lemur

Restored by a good night’s
shut-eye, we set off into the chaos the next day in search of airplane
tickets. We had decided to fly northeast
to Sambava in a few days, and to explore the national parks nearby Tana in the
meantime. We found a nearby travel agent
and paid the excessive price of 210 euros per person one way for a one-hour
flight leaving on the 16th.
Madagascans pay only two-thirds of that, and there are also discounts
for people who fly into the country on Air Madagascar, but we had to pay full
fare. It costs a lot, but it saves days
and days of miserable overland travel, so we gritted our teeth and pulled out
our credit cards.

After that we hired a taxi to
head out to the old Malagasy royal capital of Ambohimanga, about 20 kilometres
from downtown. It was another
Flintstones-era Renault, but it still cost 80,000 ariary (MGA; about 23 euros)
to hire for a few hours. We crawled
through the traffic, watching the faces of people in the streets. Madagascar has a complex history of
settlement, with the earliest immigrants (and the Malagasy language) coming
from Borneo. In the Tana area the people
look very Indonesian indeed, and the ricefields everywhere adds to the Asian
feel. We eventually got out of the
central knot of cars and drove into the surrounding hills which reminded me
more of the Kathmandu Valley:
ricefields, multi-storey red-brick buildings and surrounding hills and
distant mountains.

The view from Ambohimanga

Ambohimanga is located on a
pleasant hilltop overlooking Tana, and is full of trees and gardens and all the
peace and tranquility absent from the capital.
The old royal palace was interesting historically, although it was a bit
underwhelming physically. I preferred
the palace gardens, full of birds and jacaranda trees and providing views over
the surrounding valleys and hills. We
had a great lunch at a restaurant with sweeping views, having the Malagasy
staple of ravitoto (pork cooked in
bitter greens, one of my favourite Malagasy dishes) for the first time. We crawled back into town and I went off to
the main downtown street, Avenue de l’Independence, to change some more euros
into ariary. All the legitimate
moneychangers were shut (downtown starts to shut down by 4 pm, and it was 4:30)
and I ended up changing money with some distinctly dodgy young men on the
street. I didn’t get ripped off, but it
wasn’t an ideal situation, and I was happy to get out of there with my pocket
brimming with ariary (the biggest bill is 10,000 ariary, less than 3 euros, so
you end up carrying around fairly thick stacks of Malagasy currency.

Male Madagascar paradise-flycatcher on his nest

Saturday, November 11th
found us in a taxi fairly early in the morning headed through the streets of
Tana headed towards the taxi-brousse station.
We got ourselves into a taxi-brousse (a minibus that leaves when full,
the basic standard public transport of much of the world), waiting a bit for it
to fill up and set off for Moramanga, the nearest big town to the east. It wasn’t comfortable and didn’t provide
views, and the Malagasy pop was loud and inane, but an iPod full of podcasts
eased the pain. We changed in Moramanga
for another taxi-brousse to Andasibe, our destination, and spent part of the
ride chatting with a Dutch backpacker, Manon, who was full of stories and
useful information about her travels. We
finally arrived in Andasibe in early afternoon (what was supposed to have been
two and a half hours from Tana having stretched in common Malagasy style into
four and a half hours) and settled into our comfortable cottage in the Fean’ny
Ala Hotel, an oasis of calm and beauty after the noise and griminess of the
road.

Beautiful frog

Andasibe is the most accessible
place from Tana to see Madagascar’s wildlife, and as such is the most visited
set of parks in the country. There were
several busloads of birdwatchers in the Fean’ny Ala during our stay, and there
were always other tourists around during our wildlife walks, but the numbers
were by no means excessive. Andasibe is
one of those places that is popular for a good reason: it’s the best place to see several lemur
species, along with lots of chameleons, snakes, geckos and birds.

Sleeping chameleon

We walked along the road that
connects the hotel with the village centre (about 3 kilometres away), via the
entrances to three separate wildlife areas:
Andasibe National Park, Parc Mitsinjo and the MMA. The latter two are administered by local
village organizations independent of the Madagascar National Parks, and we
decided to do our first wildlife-spotting trip, a night walk, with the folks at
Parc Mitsinjo. On the way past the
National Park, we stopped in to find out about admission rates (they had
tripled in price since our edition of the Lonely Planet was published in 2012!)
and ended up seeing one of Madagascar’s prettiest birds, a male Madagascar
paradise-flycatcher, seated atop a nest right beside the entrance gate. We
strolled back for a sundowner on the lovely riverside balcony at Fean’ny Ala,
spotting several common brown lemurs crossing the road on overhead telephone
wires, got our spotlight and headed back to Mitsinjo for our night walk.

The fat-tailed dwarf lemur we saw at Fean'ny Ala

It was a wonderful introduction
to the Madagascar forests. We saw no
fewer than six species of chameleons, including the largest species, Parson’s
chameleon. Our guide had an unerring
eye for chameleons, as well as for frogs.
On the lemur front, we saw two small nocturnal species--Goodman’s mouse
lemur (Microcebus lehikhytsara) and the fat-tailed dwarf lemur (Cheirogaleus medius)--as well as an Eastern wooly lemur (Avahi laniger). Seeing eyes glinting back at us when we shone
our torches around was an unforgettable experience, and we walked back in the
dark along the road very satisfied with our walk. The show wasn't over, with more chameleons visible beside the road, and another fat-tailed dwarf lemur appearing in the trees beside the restaurant back at Fean'ny Ala (as he did every night that we were there).

Crested ibis

The next morning we awoke early,
at 5 am. Partly this was inevitable, as
the sun rises at 5:20 and the sky was already light, but the main wake-up
mechanism is the sound of indris calling to each other across the river at
maximum volume. Their call, a series of
rising “whoop” sounds increasing in volume, can be heard for several kilometres
around, and is impossible to sleep through.
We had breakfast and then wandered along to the MMA reserve to see what
we could see by daylight. Our guide,
George, was excellent and had a good eye for birds. We had several encounters with groups of
indris (Indri indri, described accurately in our guidebook as resembling “an eight-year-old
in a panda suit”), saw common brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus), lots of well-disguised geckos, some
beautiful flowers and a number of new bird species, including the Madagascar
crested ibis, a spectacular species that can be hard to see. It was our first encounter with the beautiful
blue coua, and we saw a juvenile Madagascar long-eared owl still in his fluffy
infantile plumage and looking slightly like a baby penguin. Sadly we missed seeing the diademed sifaka (Propithecus diadema) by
a couple of seconds, unable to spot him when George pointed him out before he scooted
into the shelter of the canopy layer. We were done by noon, had a
slightly disappointing lunch at the truck stop at the junction with the main
highway and spent the afternoon napping and taking a run along the road.

Our juvenile Madagascar long-eared owl in his fluffy plumage

November the 14th was
devoted to exploring a park slightly further afield with George, our guide from
the previous day. We rendezvoused at
6:30 am and walked out to the main highway and then 4 kilometres along the road
to reach the Maromizaha Forest Reserve, a little-visited mountainous park that
has more undisturbed primary forest than the reserves in Andasibe village. It was a long walk, mostly uphill, at first
through clearcuts and then through secondary bush before finally joining the
undisturbed primary forest in which a research team studies diademed sifakas
and indris. We were lucky with indris,
having a number of good close encounters with these, the largest surviving
lemurs, but our bad luck with diademed sifakas continued despite our best
efforts and those of George. We saw lots
of new birds, including Henst’s goshawk, the Madagascar buzzard, the Madagascar
cuckoo, the Madagascar brush warbler and the souimanga sunbird. We also got good views over the surrounding
countryside, where fires were visible in all directions, and every bit of land
that wasn’t inside a protected area had been clearcut. The immensity of the pressure on the few
remaining pockets of forest was immediately obvious.

The view from Maromizaha

We finished our walk, backtracked to the road
and hitched a lift back with a friendly trucker. After lunch with George at the little
restaurant across the street from Fean’ny Ala, we retreated to the cottage for
a big nap and then sorting through the photos from the previous few days. We waited in the restaurant for the full
moon, billed as a “supermoon”, but super or not, the clouds covered the moon
most of the time, making for a somewhat disappointing full moon experience,
although a couple of pegs of duty-free Aberlour whisky made the waiting
enjoyable.

Young indri in Parc Mitsinjo

November 15th was our
last day in Andasibe, and we were up early again with the indris to get in one
last walk in the forest. We went back to
Mitsinjo and saw it by daylight on a 2-hour tour. We had our closest-yet encounters with
indris, including one curious youngster who came right down to us to have a
close look, and accepted fresh leaves from the guide. We also saw another huge Parson’s chameleon
and a lovely spectacled tetraka before heading back to our hotel to gather our
possessions and brave the taxis-brousses back to the capital. Despite a very long, hot wait in Moramanga,
we were back in Tana by mid-afternoon with a few extra gray hairs caused by
truly reckless overtaking by our driver.
I went out to change more euros into ariary, again with the dodgy street
guys; this time I was ripped off, but only by about 20,000 ariary, or about 6
percent: annoying, but not
catastrophic. (Not like the time a dodgy
street moneychanger gave me $2 worth of Polish zloty in exchange for $100 US in
Prague in 1988 when we thought we were buying Czechoslovak korony at a really good
rate…..). An excellent Indian dinner at
the Taj Majal restaurant, and we were in bed early, ready for a very early
morning’s start to our Marojejy adventure the next morning.

Big Parson's chameleon at Mitsinjo

Andasibe was a wonderful
introduction to Madagascar’s wildlife.
It gave us lots of birds, plenty of chameleons and great encounters with
the indri, one of the crown jewels of the lemur world. The only real downer was not seeing the
diademed sifaka, which we never saw anywhere else later. In retrospect, I wish we had stayed a few
days longer, which would have given us a chance to visit more of the
further-flung reserves and parks, like Mantadia, Vohimana and Torotorofotsy, all of which
provide different lemur, bird and reptile species.

Common brown lemur mother and baby using a lemur overpass

Practical information: The taxi-brousse to Moramanga from Tana was
7000 MGA (about 2 euros) and the second leg to Andasibe was only 2000 MGA per
person. In fact it cost almost as much
for the taxi from our hotel across Tana to Ampasampito taxi-brousse station as it
did from there all the way to Andasibe.
Budget a good 4 to 5 hours for this trip, even if it’s only 140 km in
total along the best paved roads in the entire country. The Fean’ny Ala was a great place
to stay, with clean, quiet cottages with great views, a good restaurant and
lots of birds and (if you’re lucky) indris to see across the river inside the National
Park. It’s a good 30-minute walk to any
of the park entrances from there, but it’s a pleasant walk through lemur- and
chameleon-filled woods. Getting to any
of the other reserves requires some sort of transport; mountain bikes would be
good, but I didn’t see any for rent.
Hiring vehicles is relatively expensive, and there’s no public transport
to Mantadia or Vohimana or Torotorofotsy. I don’t see the
point of spending the extra 45,000 MGA per day to enter the national park; Mitsinjo and
the MMA have free admission and you just pay for the guide, and even the guide
is cheaper than at the National Park.
Other tourists, some of them serious birdwatchers and herpetologists,
have sworn in particular by Mitsinjo as a very professional organization that
is worth supporting, rather than the rather bureaucratic and overpriced
national parks.

Saturday, December 17, 2016

Our three weeks in Europe in
October and November seem very long ago now as I sit in a tropical valley in
the mountains of Madagascar, but with an effort I can shift my attention back
to that action-packed period of time long enough to get it down in print.

Terri and I hiking in Meteora, with a small uninhabited monastery behind

We arrived in Athens on October
18th from Johannesburg, via Dubai. We were there to lead a trip for
school students, and the first ten days were devoted to doing the pre-trip and
then running the trip itself. We spent
most of our time in the Meteora area, a beautiful part of northern Greece that
had been on my to-see list for decades, ever since watching For Your Eyes Only
back in about 1983. The monasteries
really look like something out of a fairytale, perched high atop eroded
conglomerate cliffs. We (and our student
group) did a great 4-hour hike in the Meteora hills leading ultimately to one
of the monasteries; they definitely need to be approached on foot in order to
appreciate them properly.

Meteora landscape

The surroundings are not what you
immediately think of when you hear the word “Greece”: no Mediterranean blue, no maquis bush. Instead there are ancient oak forests full of
wild boar and even wolves and bears. There
are obscure little hermitages tucked away in tiny hidden valleys, and even a
cave full of Neanderthal and Neolithic remains (sadly closed, although we did
drop into the museum). One day, we drove
up to Lake Plastiras, a lake high in the Pindus Mountains, along a spectacular
road that I wanted to keep following to see where it led. Overall, we were quite pleased with our
Meteora experience.

Salamander in the Meteora forests

One of the Meteora monasteries

Terri, me and Leonidas at Thermopylae

We also visited Delphi, one of
the most evocative ruins in all of Greece, nestled under the bulk of Mount
Parnassus, and (on the way between the two) passed the site of the Battle ofThermopylae (a strangely forgotten and unatmospheric spot but a place of huge
historical resonance). In Athens we went
through the amazing new(ish) Acropolis Museum, one of the great museums of the
world, and strolled around the Acropolis itself on Oxi Day, a national holiday
devoted to the word “No” (said to the Italians in 1940); there was free
admission to the Acropolis that day, and the crowds were astonishing.

Meteora hermitage carved into a cliff face

Driving around rural Greece, though, the
signs of the economic plight of most of the country were everywhere, with
shuttered factories, boarded-up shops and derelict half-built buildings
everywhere. Thiva, ancient Thebes, stuck
in my mind as a particularly grim example of post-2008 post-industrial
wasteland. Talking to Greeks, it doesn’t
sound as though anything has really improved despite 8 years of bailouts,
austerity and political brinkmanship.

The view from Delphi

Friday, October 28th
found us on a flight to Tirana, Albania.
We wanted to do a quick busman’s holiday around the Balkans, and the Greek
rental car companies are not keen on letting their cars go across borders into
countries like Albania, so we decided to start in Albania, where we picked up a
rental car in the airport for 15 euros a day.
I had been to the Balkans twice before, both times on a bicycle. In 2009, after finishing my Silk Road Ride, I
had cycled quickly through the countries of the region in November, too late in
the year to really appreciate the surroundings.
In 2015 Terri and I had ridden down the Danube, ending up in Bulgariaafter passing through Croatia, Serbia and Romania. This time we were in a hurry once again, but
we had a few objectives: we wanted to
visit friends in Mostar, I wanted to see Sarajevo, Terri wanted to add
Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro to her country list, and I wanted to see the
mountains of northern Albania. I also
wanted to see Gjirokastro, in the far south of Albania, but we just didn’t have
time to fit that in.

Terri in the Accursed Mountains above Boga

We spent the night in a cheap
guesthouse in a tower block in Tirana before pointing our wheels north on
Saturday morning. We escaped the manic
traffic of Tirana and got onto a newly built motorway that made for easy
driving. Our objective was a mountain
range in the far north of the country known as the Accursed Mountains; with a
name like that, we had to visit! After
passing through more snarled traffic in Shkoder, we turned off the main road
and entered a spectacular world of mountains and old stone villages. We drove up, up, up along a valley lined with
autumn colours on the trees. The weather
was perfect, and every turn of the valley brought another postcard-worthy
view. The limestone cliffs shone white
in the sunshine and contrasted sharply with the deep blue of the mountain
skies. It reminded both of us of fall
weekends in the Swiss Alps, and the brand-new asphalt road could have been
straight out of Switzerland as well.
Finally, atop a 1600-metre high pass, we ran out of asphalt and although
we bravely tried to push on in our tiny two-wheel drive compact Maruti, it was
an unequal struggle and after having to back up on a narrow dirt track in the
face of an oncoming livestock truck (actually we gave the keys to one of the
farmers to back up for us, as it was a pretty scary stretch of road with a huge
cliff on one side), we gave up and retreated to the pass.

The valley of Boga

We had to abandon the idea of
driving ourselves to the village of Theth (visible far, far below) and instead
parked the car and went for a walk for a few hours up the valley to a dramatic
viewpoint perched atop a cliff, looking down at the Theth Valley below our
feet. This mountainous area has gotten
onto the radar of western European hikers in the past decade, and it’s easy to
see why. This area has all the beauty of
the Alps at a tiny fraction the price, and with a tiny fraction of the number
of hikers on it (we saw exactly none that day).
The hiking trail was well marked and well maintained. We had read about a new international
long-distance hiking trail, the Via Dinarica, and it passes right through this
area. If I had much more time, I would
love to hike the length of the Via Dinarica, getting to know this mountainous
area of the world that is so little known in the West.

Hiking in the Accursed Mountains

After our hike, we drove back
down the asphalt to the village of Boga, where we found accommodation in the
home of the family of Zef, a gruff farmer.
He, his wife and his daughter Madgalena made us welcome in their
farmhouse and we had a great time, despite not having any language in common
other than a tiny amount of Italian.
Like everyone in the valley, the family is Catholic; I hadn’t really
appreciated what a multi-confessional country Albania is, with Catholics making
up the second biggest religious group (10% of the population) after Muslims
(about 57%), just ahead of Eastern Orthodox (7%). Mother Teresa was an ethnic Albanian Catholic
(born in Skopje when that was a Turkish city; it was then a Serbian city before
becoming the capital of modern Macedonia; this is why four different countries
now claim her as their own; we had landed at Mother Teresa International
Airport in Tirana), and it is encouraging that in a region not noted for its
religious tolerance in the past few decades, Albania has not had any
religiously inspired civil strife. We
had a wonderful evening trying to talk to the family, and Terri hit it off with
Magdalena in particular.

Terri with our wonderful host family in Boga

It was a chilly evening, and we
delayed our departure the next morning while the sun warmed up the bottom of
the valley. We went for another short
hike up above Boga in the sunshine, drinking in the views and watching the
villagers walking back from church service.
We returned to the farmhouse to find the parents entertaining neighbours
with coffee and cake after church, while other villagers took themselves to the
local café for something a little stronger.
We said our goodbyes and drove off down the valley, snapping photos and
promising ourselves that one day we would return to explore the Accursed
Mountains properly.

Fall colours in Albania

Sveti Stefan, Montenegro

We drove north along the main
road, past fields planted with medicinal herbs (a big cash crop in the area)
and eventually to the northern shore of Lake Shkoder, where we crossed the
border into Montenegro. It was a quick,
painless process, as all our subsequent Balkan border crossings proved to be. We bought our 40-euro car insurance Green
Card (good for all European countries for 15 days), showed our passports and
car registration, and two minutes later we were off into Montenegro. It was a very pretty drive along the
lakeshore, past monasteries, prettily situated villages and a smattering of
holiday homes. Eventually we popped
through a tunnel linking the lake with the Adriatic coast and turned
north. We drove along one of the
prettiest coastlines in Europe, one of the highlights of my 2009 bike trip, and
eventually turned off the road in Sveti Stefan to find accommodation for the
night. We first had a stroll along the
coast, past the bridge to the gorgeous offshore island of Sveti Stefan (once
Tito’s summer fiefdom, now a private and very expensive Russian-owned hotel) and
past another couple of top-end hotels on the mainland. It was a very pretty walk, but eventually we
returned to the car and got serious about searching for a place to stay. Most rental apartments were closed for the
season, but just before sundown we found a place for 30 euros, ran to a nearby
grocery store for wine and toasted a dramatic sunset over a wind-whipped
Adriatic. A takeaway pasta carbonara dinner and an early night completed the
day.

Bay of Kotor, Montenegro

The wind howled all night, but
once the sun came up on Monday, October 31st, the sea calmed down. We had a slow, relaxed start with time for me
to have a run up and down the hilly streets of town before a breakfast of
bread, honey, olives and jam. By 10 am
we were underway, driving further up the coast before turning inland to drive
halfway around the dramatic (and dramatically traffic-choked) Bay of
Kotor. We turned inland up a big climb
over the coastal mountains and onto a limestone plateau that continued for many
kilometres to the Bosnian border and beyond.
We continued along the plateau, through the Republika Srpska (the
Serbian bit of Bosnia-Hercegovina) until further progress was halted at the
pseudo-border with the Bosniak-Croat confederation by mine-clearing operations
beside the road, a reminder of the lasting aftereffects of the Bosnian War. Once the mine-clearers were finished, we
drove upstream to pretty Trebinje, then along a lovely valley and over a hill
to reach Mostar where my friend and former LAS colleague Jonathan and his wife
Jane are living. We rendezvoused with
Jane at the United World College, located in the old Gymnase building in the
centre of town, and drove to their apartment overlooking the old Turkish centre
of Mostar.

Night over Mostar Old Town

Mostar is one of my favourite
places in the Balkans, and I used to have a print of the Hungarian painter Csontvary’s painting of
its famous Ottoman bridge hanging on my bedroom wall at university. Jane, Terri and I walked down to the bridge
and enjoyed the beautiful old Ottoman architecture of the surrounding streets. The bridge was lit up (evening came early now
that daylight savings time was over) and looked very pretty indeed. We returned to the apartment to meet up with
Jonathan, and the evening passed by very pleasantly over dinner and wine,
catching up on the past few years since they left Leysin.

The next morning was the first
day of November. Jonathan left early for
school and Jane waved us off as we drove our trusty Maruti upstream in the
direction of Sarajevo. It was a
relatively short drive, and we arrived in the city by 1:30. We found a parking spot near our rental
apartment, right beside the massive Sarajevo Brewery, but couldn’t get hold of
the apartment owner to get the keys. We
repaired to a nearby café to use their wifi and have a beer and realized that
the non-smoking revolution in bars and restaurants has not yet come to
Bosnia. We were thoroughly fumigated
with cigarettes before the owner showed up with the keys and let us in.

Terri and Jane in Mostar's Old Town

Where the First World War kicked off

Terri had been to Sarajevo a
decade before, but I had never made it that far into Bosnia. We strolled into the old Ottoman centre of
town and headed straight for Sarajevo’s biggest claim to fame, the street
corner at which Gavrilo Princip lit the fuse that led to the carnage of World
War One by assassinating Austro-Hungarian Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28th,
1914. It’s just an ordinary-looking
street corner, but a branch of the Sarajevo City Museum occupies one of the
buildings on the corner and displays pictures of the fateful day and its
aftermath. The amazing thing to me is
that Franz Ferdinand had already survived one assassination attempt by the Serb
nationalists of the Black Hand that very day.
Rather than keeping himself safe and out of sight until he could leave
the city, he decided to drive right back into the city centre an hour later,
which is when Princip was more successful second time around. We took a few photos and then continued our
stroll around the old town, past mosques and medressehs and the old
market. It was very atmospheric, and we
eventually retired to Pod Letom for a hearty meal; photos outside and on the
wall attested to the fact that Bill Clinton had eaten there twice over the
years (both times since he retired from the presidency). We returned to our apartment, re-parked the
car out of the paid lot we had left it in onto the street outside the brewery,
and retired early for the night.

Mosque in Sarajevo Old Town

Sarajevo was the furthest north
we would reach on our Balkans peregrinations.
Wednesday, November 2nd found us heading out of town along a
dramatic gorge cut into the mountains.
Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympics, and we climbed up to the
village of Pale, site of the ski races and then the capital of Radovan
Karadzic’s murderous Serbian republican forces.
We continued along, past other ski towns, until we suddenly came upon
the border with Montenegro. As soon as
we crossed the border, we left behind the dark, slightly gloomy valleys of
Bosnia for radiant highlands in the interior of Montenegro. It really seems as though Montenegro is the
scenic highlight of the former Yugoslavia, no matter what part of the country
you visit. After driving for hours along
small roads, we found ourselves in the town of Berane as afternoon turned to
evening, so we found a cheap hotel and called it a night.

The following day (Thursday,
November 3rd) was grey and rainy, a sharp contrast to the brilliant
sunshine we had had almost every day so far.
We drove past tiny ski resorts and then up, up, up to the mountain pass
leading into Kosovo. Terri had never
visited Kosovo and was keen to see the country.
Our plan was to stop in Peja (Pec) and spend the afternoon doing some
hiking and visiting the Serbian monastery.
The weather didn’t improve, however, and Peja proved to be a crowded,
chaotic construction zone of a city, so we just kept driving (along streets
named after Tony Blair, John Kerry, Bill Clinton and others involved in ending
the Kosovo War back in 1999) towards the Macedonian border. I remembered in 2009 not being overly
enamoured of Kosovo, and this trip confirmed my previous opinion. The mountains along the frontiers are very
pretty, but the country is very densely populated and is just an unending
straggle of half-built new houses, of little interest to the casual tourist.

Alexander the Great statue, Skopje

We crossed into Macedonia on a
road down a deep gorge and immediately the weather and the depressing
industrial landscape changed. We drove
into the traffic snarl of downtown Skopje and got immediately lost. We went in circles, we cursed our Maps.me
smartphone app, and eventually we parked the car in an obscure backstreet and
set out on foot to find a place to stay.
We ended up in a nice apartment overlooking the remodelled centre of
Skopje and set off to explore.

I remember Skopje as a slightly
artsy town with a bunch of cafes and Irish pubs in the slightly worn downtown
core. The past seven years have seen
immense changes to the cityscape, as the government has lavished hundreds of
millions of dollars completely gutting and redeveloping the city centre in a
style best described as Las Vegas Marble Kitsch. Alexander the Great has been adopted as the
national hero (even though the ancient Macedonian kingdom was centred further
south, in modern-day Greece, and modern Macedonians are Slavic speakers with a
language most akin to Bulgarian), and the government has erected immense gilt
statues of Alexander, and of his father Philip and mother Olympias and baby
Alex, in the middle of a huge pedestrian thoroughfare. New pedestrian bridges have gone up over the
river, lined with more statues of historical figures (both ancient and
nineteenth century), while a historical museum, an opera house and several
government ministries all rise in Corinthian columns above the bemused
Soviet-era concrete lowrises surrounding the centre. It all looks very kitsch, and it’s apparently
not hugely popular with a large section of the population, fed up with official
corruption and political underhandedness.

Anti-government paint bombs, Skopje

Some of the marble wedding-cake buildings in Skopje

If you look carefully, you can see blotches of purple, green, red and
yellow staining the white marble of the new constructions, the result of
protestors hurling balloons filled with paint against the hated symbols of theregime. We wandered around the downtown
taking pictures and reading the captions on dozens of statues. We were divided in our opinion of the city’s
makeover: I thought it looked very fake
and artificial, but Terri thought it was an improvement on the soulless
concrete that was once there.

In 2009 I had enjoyed Macedonia
more than any other country I visited on my Balkan bike blitz, and I was keen
to see new parts of the country and to show Terri the undoubted highlight of
Macedonia, the ancient monastery town of Ohrid.
We drove west out of Skopje the next morning and then turned south,
passing through pretty valleys studded with minarets (this northwest corner of
Macedonia, abutting Kosovo and Albania, is where the country’s sizeable Muslim
minority live), over a couple of passes and finally into the resort town of
Ohrid. We found our holiday apartment
(at 15 euros a night for a big apartment, it was a deal) owned by a personable
professor named Joce, checked in and then went for a wander.

Veletsevo village, overlooking Lake Ohrid

Ohrid is historically a very
important spot, as it was at the monasteries along the shores of the lovely
highland lake that Greek Orthodox monks like Clement of Ohrid developed the Cyrillic
alphabet to write down Old Church Slavonic, the mother tongue of all the Slavic
languages. We strolled past a couple of
the monasteries (sadly one was under reconstruction and the other was locked)
and then along the lakeshore, past another big government project to build a
new university in the old town. We
bought roast chestnuts to ward off the early evening chill and watched the
light fade over the lake.

Hiking in lovely Galicica

The next day we didn’t have to
drive to a new city to sleep (the only time we spent two consecutive nights in
the same place on the entire trip), and we took advantage of this to have a day
of hiking under glorious sunshine in the mountains of the Galicica NationalPark that rise straight out of Lake Ohrid.
We had only a vague hint of a map, and the trail markings were pretty
inconsistent, but we still had a splendid day in the mountains, soaking up huge
views that extended across the lake into Albania and south into Greece. We had the entire area almost entirely to
ourselves, although our starting point, the village of Veletsevo, was crowded
with people laying flowers and having picnics at the graves of family members
in the village cemetery (perhaps because it was the first weekend after All
Saint’s Day?). We underestimated the
amount of time we would need for the trek, and did the last half hour in the
dark, but it was a huge highlight for me on this Balkan adventure, and
reinforced my desire to come back with a few weeks to spare to do some
long-distance hiking through this mountainous hiker’s paradise.

Hiking in Galicica

Sunday November 6th
found us finishing up the driving of the trip with a few hours from Ohrid back
to Tirana. The scenery was dramatic much
of the way as we dropped out of the highland basin of Lake Ohrid down a narrow
canyon to Elbasan, where we stopped for an immense lamb feast. From there we were only an hour or so from
Tirana, and we managed to navigate the traffic horror of the Albanian capital
more or less unscathed. We checked in
again to Guesthouse Mary and had an early night before our morning flight.

The next morning found us
dropping off the car at the airport and checking in for our Aegean Airlines
flight back to Athens. We made our way
to the Adonis Hotel, retrieved our stored luggage and then spent the afternoon
separately on frustrating errands. I
wanted to get my camera cleaned as there is dust on the CCD, but Monday
afternoons by law all shops in Athens close at 3 pm, just after I got to the
camera shop. I didn’t yet know about the
early closing law, so I wasted more time trying to find outdoor equipment
shops, which were similarly shut. Terri
meanwhile was navigating the crowds and hopelessness of the Greek medical
system, trying to get her left knee, still sore 7 weeks after falling on it in
the Tsodilo Hills, looked at. She
eventually saw an overworked doctor and paid a ridiculously low 9 euros to do
so, but didn’t get much useful practical information on what to do to get
better.

The evening made up for the day,
however, as I found some Spanish cava for sale and brought home some take-out
gyros sandwiches. We sat on our
perfectly-situated terrace looking out at the lit-up Parthenon and savouring
the historical atmosphere. We both
agreed that Greece and the Balkans deserve more time on a future trip, although
it’s not clear when that will be.

And then it was November 8th
and we were on an air odyssey, first to Dubai, then Johannesburg, then Nairobi
and finally to Antananarivo, ready to spend the next six weeks exploring the
“Eighth Continent”, the wildlife diversity hotspot of Madagascar. Stay tuned to this space to read up on our
various adventures in Madagascar!

Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Here's a newly updated list of the countries I've visited over the course of my life, arranged by the date of my first visit to the country. I don't count my home country, Canada. Of course, exactly what constitutes a country is a bit slippery.My well-travelled friendNatalya Marquandholds that the only objective list is the 193 permanent members of the UN.Others hold that these countries, plus the non-UN-member Vatican City, make up the 194 canonical countries of the world.I think the reality is a bit slippier.When I visitedNagorno-KarabakhandAbkhazia, despite the fact that these countries aren’t universally recognized, I had to get a visa to visit them and cross at a border post manned by people in uniform who stamped my passport.Somalilandnot only has its own consulates and border guards, it even has its own currency.And, to take an extreme example, anyone who claims thatTaiwanisn’t effectively an independent country isn’t really recognizing what’s been de facto the case since 1949.

So my list of independent countries is a bit bigger than 194. It’s about 204 countries; the number may fluctuate a bit, and it doesn’t include three countries (Western Sahara, Palestine and Tibet) with pretty legitimate cases but without their own border guards. One of the many lists of countries on Wikipedia lists 206 entries that either are recognized by at least one other state as being independent, or effectively control a permanently populated territory, but they include Western Sahara and Palestine which are at the moment illusory pipe dreams, to the distress of the people who inhabit them. If I'm not counting Canada, that would make 193 or 203 possible destinations.

Anyway, without further preamble, here’s my list of the countries I have visited, arranged according to the date I first visited them. The non-UN/Vatican members of the list are coloured red; there are eight of them, so if you’re counting by the UN+Vatican list, it’s 117 (out of 193). I would make it 125 out of 203. Whichever way you count it, I’m now well over half-way to my goal of visiting them all, and my to-visit list is now down into double digits.

1969

1. US

1977

2.France

3.Switzerland

4.Liechtenstein

5.Germany

6.Netherlands

1981

7.Tanzania

1982

8.Norway

9.Italy

1988

10.UK

11. Vatican

12.Greece

13.Hungary

14.Austria

15.Czech Republic (Prague, then part of the now-defunct Czechoslovakia)

Over the rest of 2016 I should add Swaziland and Lesotho, with Namibia, Rwanda and maybe Burundi, South Sudan, Sudan and Eritrea joining the list in early 2017 (those last 4 are all dubious but possible). So by mid-2017 I should be at about 135 countries visited. The 70 or so countries left will then be concentrated in west and central Africa (around 25), Central America and the Caribbean (another 25 or so), with outliers in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and a few in Africa. Stanley's Travels II could account for a lot of the remaining African countries, while a sailboat trip or two might be called for when it comes to the oceanic islands and the Caribbean. We will see.

I turned 48 in September. I think I still have 20 good years of travel left in me, which would mean averaging 3.5 new countries a year over that period of time if I want to end up visiting all the countries in the world. I think I can do that fairly comfortably.

Thursday, December 1, 2016

When we crossed into South Africa
from Botswana at Bokspits, a microscopic border crossing in the far northwest
of the country, on Monday, October 3rd, it was in one sense a
homecoming for Stanley (a South African registered vehicle), and in another
sense the end of the adventurous part of our big loop around Southern
Africa. We still had well over 1500 km
to drive to the Johannesburg area, where we were going to store Stanley for a
couple of months, but suddenly we were in a country full of shopping malls and
sprawling suburbs and it felt as though we had left Africa behind at the
border.

We drove south from Bokspits on
perfect new tarmac, past big fenced-in ranches and huge communal nests built by
sociable weaver birds on top of telephone poles. Desert melons, the life-giving moisture
source of the Kalahari, grew beside the road wherever fences prevented the
cattle from eating them. As we
approached Upington, the regional centre, a structure oddly reminiscent of the
Death Star appeared in the distance, glowing strangely. It was a solar-thermal electricity plant,
built by a Spanish company, in which a huge array of mirrors reflect sunlight
upwards, concentrating the rays at the top of a high tower where the combined
heat is used to generate electric power.
Apparently Upington has three of these structures nearby, although we
only saw one, and hundreds of Spanish engineers live and work in Upington
building and maintaining them.

Kalahari desert melons

Upington was a culture shock
after the emptiness of the Botswanan Kalahari.
We drove through fancy white suburbs to an immense Pick’n’Pay
supermarket and shopping mall. We
refilled Stanley’s fridge (working well since its repair in Maun a few days
before), changed our leftover Botswanan pula for South African rand, ate some
meat pies (our favourite southern African quick lunch), bought Terri a new pair
of binoculars, and then drove west towards Augrabies Falls National Park. It was a pretty drive along the Orange River,
past a long series of irrigated vineyards that contrasted sharply with the
dusty Kalahari scrubland beside them.

The Upington Death Star

There was no camping available at
Augrabies Falls National Park, so we found a place to stay a few kilometres
outside the gate at the Augrabies Falls Lodge and Campground. It was well maintained, with pretty grounds
and good facilities, but a bit close to the noise of the main road. We finished up the huge pot of lentil and pea
soup that we had been carrying around and slept soundly inside Stanley.

We set off for Augrabies National
Park the next morning on our trusty folding bicycles after some fresh scones
for breakfast courtesy of Terri. We went
first to see the waterfalls, an impressive sight of crashing waters even in the
dry season. The canyon into which the
river hurtles is deep, steep and made of beautiful slabs of reddish
sandstone. We set off on the Dassie
Hike, but turned back when Terri’s leg, still sore from her tumble at Tsodilo
Hills a few weeks earlier, complained about the steep river crossings. We opted for the shorter but more scenic hike
out to Arrowhead Point, where two side canyons join the main river. One of those tributaries has Twin Falls on
it, another beautiful waterfall.

Terri at Arrowhead Point

We had
a picnic lunch seated in the scanty shade of a small tree (it was properly hot
by midday) and watched a pair of rock kestrels nesting on the sheer cliff on
the opposite bank of the canyon.
Pale-winged starlings, a characteristic species of Augrabies Falls, flew
by in small groups. As we walked back to
the lodge, more new species appeared:
acacia pied barbets and southern masked weavers, along with dozens of
fat, contented rock hyraxes (dassies, if you’re South African). We rode back to our campground, then returned
shortly before sunset for a night safari.
We were hoping to see aardwolves (a secretive type of hyena) but had no
luck, although our spotlights picked out fleeting glimpses of the eyes of
genets, African wild cats and spotted eagle owls. We had more substantial views of eland,
springbok, steenbok and klipspringer, as well as Cape hare, scrub hare and red
rock rabbit. We cycled home in the pitch
black under clear starry skies and went to bed immediately.

Twin Falls

The next day was less productive,
although we did manage to do some laundry, bake brownies and catch up on
e-mail, as well as getting in a long run, some yoga and broiling some delicious
lamb for dinner.

Thursday, October 6th
found us backtracking to Upington. We
had originally planned to head further west to see the desert flowers around
Springbok, but a phone call there revealed that in fact the flower season had
peaked a month earlier and there were almost no flowers to be seen. Rather than drive 400 km on a wild goose
chase, we started the long retreat to Johannesburg instead. It was a short, pleasant drive back to
Upington, once again through the vineyards and orchards along the river, and we
picked a big municipal campsite, Die Eiland, as our base for the next few
days. It was pleasantly situated on the
banks of the Orange River, even if it did look a bit past its prime. We set up our table and camp chairs to claim
a spot, then drove back downtown to get some work done on Stanley. An auto-electrician fixed the malfunctioning
door switch that had been setting off our car alarm intermittently for the past
two weeks (for the princely sum of US$ 18), and then while Terri went shopping
for some new clothes, I dropped off the car at a garage to replace a blown
front shock and to replace a worn-out and leaking tire, and dropped off my
malfunctioning watch to get repaired. By
5:00 I was picking up Terri to head back to Die Eiland.

Some desert vegetation

When we drove into the campsite,
it was immediately obvious that our camp table, chairs and our dish drying rack
were all gone. We asked around, both the
three locals sitting around having a braai, and the campground employees, but
nobody (of course) had seen anything.
Infuriated at the pointless vandalism of such a theft, we went back to
reception, demanded (and received) our money back and called the police to
report the theft. The police were
spectacularly unhelpful, much to Terri’s disgust, and we eventually gave up and
moved across the river to a tiny private campground, Sakkie se Arkie, where we
stayed for the next 4 nights. It was
safe and friendly and well-run, very unlike Die Eiland. We were annoyed about losing our chairs and
table, but we heard that we had gotten off lucky; other campers who have stayed
the night have had far more stolen, and one couple staying indoors at Die
Eiland’s bungalows had thieves break in while they were in the bungalow and
clean them out of all their valuables. Everyone
in town agreed that Die Eiland had fallen apart over the past 15 years under
dubious municipal management, having once been rated the top municipal campground in the country back in the apartheid era.

Lovely rock face, Augrabies Falls

The next day we went to the
Kalahari Mall to buy me a few new clothes, and to replace our table, chairs and
dishrack. The chairs were expensive, but
were so comfortable that we didn’t really begrudge the money. We headed back to our campground and I spent
a while trying my luck at fishing; although others were getting bites, I got
nothing but snags, and had to cut off three hooks in a row.

Terminally relaxed hyrax, Augrabies Falls

Saturday, October 8th
found us ready to head off, but when I went over to pick up my watch, the watch
repair shop was unexpectedly closed.
Since I had specifically asked if they would be open Saturday morning, I
was quite annoyed, especially since they didn’t answer their various
phones. We had lunch, then cycled off to
the big tourist sight in Upington, the Orange River Winery, for some wine
tasting. We were surprised to find that
something relying on the tourist trade closed at 3 pm on a Saturday, so we were
out of luck. We retreated to town,
frustrated, and found an Irish pub to have a huge meal and watch the New
Zealand-South Africa rugby match. It was
a massacre, with the All Blacks running in 9 tries to humiliate the
Springboks. Strangely, Terri wasn’t the
only person cheering the All Blacks; a number of non-white South Africans were
cheering for the visitors as well.
Apparently the Springboks are still viewed as the team of the
apartheid-era Boers, and don’t enjoy universal support among coloured and black
South Africans.

Augrabies Falls scenery

Sunday, October 9th
was another fairly lazy day, spent doing a few exercises, writing a blog post,
having a long lunch, taking a long bird-watching stroll along the river with
Terri, running and then having sundowner drinks with an interesting older
couple, Ros and Anthony, both white East Africans (one from Kenya, the other
from Tanzania) who are keen sailors and bird watchers. We sat listening to some of their stories,
then retreated to our campsite for a late dinner. I stayed up late taking advantage of having
good internet for once to post some photos from Botswana and upload my blog
post.

Augrabies sunset light

Monday, October 10th
saw us finally break free of Upington, not without resistance. The watch repair guy was open, but the watch
wasn’t yet fixed. We went to the grocery
store to stock up, then returned to find the watch not repaired, but at least
physically present. Muttering
imprecations, I took the watch and drove us out of town towards
Johannesburg. It was a long day of
driving, most of it through not very interesting countryside (a mix of bleak
desert, grim mining areas, rough towns and commercial farms), ending up at
sundown in the small town of Delareyville, where we spent the night camped at
the Pigmy Lodge, a small campground attached to a cheese farm. We sampled some of their excellent goat
cheeses with some wine before dinner, ate some leftovers and were in bed early,
tired from driving.

Tuesday, October 11th
was the end of the road for the first leg of Stanley’s Travels. We had a leisurely bacon and avocado
breakfast and set off by 9 o’clock, carrying a couple of packets of the farm’s
goat cheese. Terri drove the first 100
km before I took over for the final 325 km.
We cruised into Johannesburg past the endless mining towns of the
Witwatersrand. We made it most of the
way through the Johannesburg suburban sprawl without incident before hitting a
traffic jam that saw us take an hour to cover 3 km. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the
traffic jam was over and we were flying out of town headed east towards the
tiny town of Delmas, the headquarters of Blinkgat, the small camper
manufacturer who had made Stanley’s camper insert. We stopped off for meat pies at Pick’n’Pay,
then followed directions out of town, past a dismal looking township of
corrugated iron shacks, to a small farm just outside town where Sarel and Elize
de Klerk, the owners of Blinkgat, live and run their workshop.

Maree and Stanley with Stanley's creator, Sarel de Klerk

We had thought about taking
Stanley camping for the few days before our flight to Athens on Oct. 17th,
but Sarel and Elize urged us to camp in their garden, an offer which we gladly
accepted. We spent a few hours the next
day going over Stanley, detailing the modifications and repairs that we wanted
to have done in our absence. A sliding
drawer for our fridge, a new awning and some changes to the food and dish
storage system, along with some much-needed rainproofing, were the main items,
along with a general servicing of the pickup truck. We figured that since we
had spent so long living in Stanley, we had figured out what we most wanted to
make him even more user-friendly.

The days slipped by easily,
cleaning our stuff out of Stanley in preparation for the workshop and storing
them in one of the farm’s outbuildings.
We had a lot of interesting discussions with Sarel and Elize, both of
them keen explorers of southern Africa’s wild spaces, ate lots of good food,
did some exercise and running and generally relaxed after five and a half
months on the go.

On Saturday we drove into
Johannesburg to have lunch with my friend Angelo and his family. We stayed overnight in The Birches, the small
backpackers’ lodge where we had stayed when we had first bought Stanley back in
April; Ian, the friendly owner, was curious to hear our stories from the
road. We also heard from one of our fellow guests that he had been mugged on the street in downtown Johannesburg that very day; we were glad that we had avoided the worse of South Africa's crime frenzy. On Sunday we had brunch with
my fellow Thunder Bay-ite Erin Conway-Smith (the southern Africa correspondent
for the Economist) before heading back to Delmas.

On Monday, October 17th
we bid Stanley a fond farewell for two months and caught a lift with Elize to
OR Tambo Airport for a flight to Athens.
We won’t see Stanley again until December 21st, when we
return from Madagascar. It will be good
to see him fixed up and looking spic and span, and it will be good to resume
our nomadic lifestyle on our own 4 wheels.
We have both really enjoyed how well we have lived, and how much
unforgettable wildlife and scenery we have seen, since late April. Our final tally for the first leg of
Stanley’s Travels is something like this:

Total time since leaving
Johannesburg: 5 months and 19 days

Total distance covered: 20,558
km

Number of countries visited: 6

Number of national parks visited: 17

Number of flat tires: 2

Number of sunsets viewed: at least 130

Number of bottles of wine
consumed: probably too many

Number of amazing campsites: a large number

Favourite country: Botswana

It really was a life-altering
sort of trip, seeing so much of the beauty of the African bush up close and
personal. It would have been nice to get
in more hiking and physical exercise (I feel a lot flabbier than would be the
case after a bicycle trip of this duration!) but that is a minor quibble given
the amazing time we had on a consistent basis for months on end. Sitting around the campfire in so many
beautiful locations, watching the sun set in a blaze of orange, gazing up at
the stars, listening to the sounds of hyenas and nightjars and owls and lions
in the distance: all these experiences
were made possible by us having bought Stanley.

We look forward to lap two of
Stanley’s Travels around Africa starting in December and continuing until…..we
don’t know. The plan is to head through
South Africa, Swaziland and Lesotho, then head north into Namibia (the
favourite country of almost everyone who explores southern Africa), cross into
Zambia again and then drive further north into Tanzania, Burundi, Rwanda,
Uganda and Kenya. If the security
situation and visas permit, I’d like to head through Ethiopia (currently in the
midst of serious unrest) and Sudan, but I’m not sure that will happen this
time. If we do make it to Sudan, it’s a
bit of a dead end: Egypt is a
bureaucratic and monetary and security nightmare, and the other ways out
are to take a ferry to Saudi Arabia (then Kuwait, Iran and Turkey to get to Europe), to return south to South Africa, or to
ship Stanley out of Sudan somewhere else in the world. We have not yet come to any final conclusion
what the end game will be, but I am sure that the next leg of Stanley’s Travels
will be as rewarding as the first one was.